Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest Part 20

GRAHAM, GID. _Animal Outlaws_, Collinsville, Oklahoma, 1938. OP. A remarkable collection of animal stories. Privately printed.

GRINNELL, GEORGE BIRD. Between 1893 and 1913, Grinnell, partly in collaboration with Theodore Roosevelt, edited five volumes for The Boone and Crockett Club that contain an extraordinary amount of information, written mostly by men of civilized perspective, on bears, deer, mountain sheep, buffaloes, cougars, elk, wolves, moose, mountains, and forests.

The series, long out of print, is a storehouse of knowledge not to be overlooked by any student of wild life in the West. The t.i.tles are: _American Big-Game Hunting_, 1893; _Hunting in Many Lands_, 1895; _Trail and Camp-Fire_, 1897; _American Big Game in Its Haunts_, 1904; _Hunting at High Alt.i.tudes_, 1913.

GRINNELL, JOSEPH; DIXON, JOSEPH S.; and LINSDALE, JEAN M. _Fur-Bearing Mammals of California: Their Natural History, Systematic Status, and Relation to Man_, two volumes, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1937. The king, so far, of all state natural histories.

HALL, E. RAYMOND. _Mammals of Nevada_, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1946. So far as my knowledge goes, this is the only respect-worthy book extant pertaining to the state whose economy is based on fees from divorces and gambling and whose best-known citizen is Senator Pat McCarran.

HARTMAN, CARL G. _Possum_, University of Texas Press, Austin, 1952. This richly ill.u.s.trated book comprehends everything pertaining to the subject from prehistoric marsupium to baking with sweet potatoes in a Negro cabin. It is the outcome of a lifetime's scientific investigation not only of possums but of libraries and popular talk. Thus, in addition to its biographical and natural history aspects, it is a study in the evolution of man's knowledge about one of the world's folkiest creatures.

{ill.u.s.t. caption = Charles M. Russell, in _The Blazed Trail of the Old Frontier_ by Agnes C. Laut (1926)}

HORNADAY, WILLIAM T. _Camp Fires on Desert and Lava_, London, n.d. OP.

Dr. Hornaday, who died in 1937, was the first director of the New York Zoological Park. He was a great conservationist and an authority on the wild life of America.

HUDSON, W. H. _The Naturalist in La Plata_, New York, 1892. Not about the Southwest or even North America, but Hudson's chapters on "The Puma," "Some Curious Animal Weapons," "The Mephitic Skunk," "Humming Birds," "The Strange Instincts of Cattle," "Horse and Man," etc. come home to the Southwest. Few writers tend to make readers so aware; no other has written so delightfully of the lands of gra.s.s.

INGERSOLL, ERNEST. _Wild Neighbors_, New York, 1897. OP. A superior work. Chapter II, "The Father of Game," is on the cougar; Chapter IV, "The Hound of the Plains," is on the coyote; there is an excellent essay on the badger. Each chapter is provided with a list of books affording more extended treatment of the subject.

JAEGER, EDMUND C. _Denizens of the Desert_, Boston, 1922. OP. "Don Coyote," the roadrunner, and other characteristic animals. _Our Desert Neighbors_, Stanford University Press, California, 1950.

LOCKE, LUCIE H. _Naturally Yours, Texas_, Naylor, San Antonio, 1949.

Charm must never be discounted; it is far rarer than facts, and often does more to lead to truth. This slight book is in verse and drawings, type integrated with delectable black-and-white representations of the prairie dog, armadillo, sanderling, mesquite, whirlwind, sand dune, mirage, and dozens of other natural phenomena. The only other book in this list to which it is akin is Eve Ganson's _Desert Mavericks_.

LUMHOLTZ, CARL. _Unknown Mexico_, New York, 1902. Nearly anything about animals as well as about Indians and mountains of Mexico may be found in this extraordinary two-volume work. OP.

MCILHENNY, EDWARD A. _The Alligator s Life History_, Boston, 1935. OP.

The alligator got farther west than is generally known--at least within reach of Laredo and Eagle Pa.s.s on the Rio Grande. McIlhenny's book treats--engagingly, intimately, and with precision--of the animal in Louisiana. Hungerers for anatomical biology are referred to _The Alligator and Its Allies_ by A. M. Reese, New York, 1915. I have more to say about McIlhenny in Chapter 30.

MARCY, COLONEL R. B. _Thirty Years of Army Life on the Border_, New York, 1866. Marcy had a scientific mind and a high sense of values. He knew how to write and what he wrote remains informing and pleasant.

MARTIN, HORACE T. _Castorologia, or The History and Traditions of the Canadian Beaver_, London, 1892. OP. The beaver is a beaver, whether on Hudson's Bay or the Mexican side of the Rio Grande. Much has been written on this animal, the propeller of the trappers of the West, but this famous book remains the most comprehensive on facts and the amplest in conception. The author was humorist as well as scientist.

MENGER, RUDOLPH. _Texas Nature Observations and Reminiscences_, San Antonio, 1913. OP. Being of an educated German family, Dr. Menger found many things in nature more interesting than two-headed calves.

MILLS, ENOS. _The Rocky Mountain Wonderland, Wild Life on the Rockies, Waiting in the Wilderness_, and other books. Some naturalists have taken exception to some observations recorded by Mills; nevertheless, he enlarges and freshens mountain life.

MUIR, JOHN. _The Mountains of California, Our National Parks_, and other books. Muir, a great naturalist, had the power to convey his wise sympathies and brooded-over knowledge.

MURPHY, JOHN MORTIMER. _Sporting Adventures in the Far West_, London, 1879. One of the earliest roundups of game animals of the West.

NEWSOME, WILLIAM M. _The Whitetailed Deer_, New York, 1926. OP. Standard work.

PALLISER, JOHN. _The Solitary Hunter; or Storting Adventures in the Prairies_, London, 1857.

ROOSEVELT, THEODORE. _Outdoor Pastimes of an American Hunter_, with a chapter ent.i.tled "Books on Big Game"; _Hunting Adventures in the West; The Wilderness Hunter; Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail; A Book Lover's Holiday in the Open; The Deer Family_ (in collaboration).

SEARS, PAUL B. _Deserts on the March_, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1935. Dramatic picturization of the forces of nature operating in what droughts of the 1930's caused to be called "the Dust Bowl."

"Drought and Wind and Man" might be another t.i.tle.

SETON, ERNEST THOMPSON. _Wild Animals I Have Known; Lives of the Hunted_. Probably no other writer of America has aroused so many people, young people especially, to an interest in our wild animals. Natural history encyclopedias he has auth.o.r.ed are _Life Histories of Northern Animals_, New York, 1920, and _Lives of Game Animals_, New York, 1929.

Seton's final testament, _Trail of an Artist Naturalist_ (Scribner's, New York, 1941), has a deal on wild life of the Southwest.

THORPE, T. B. _The Hive of the Bee-Hunter_, New York, 1854. OP. Juicy.

WARREN, EDWARD ROYAL. _The Mammals of Colorado_, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1942. OP.

27. Buffaloes and Buffalo Hunters

THE LITERATURE on the American bison, more popularly called buffalo, is enormous. Nearly everything of consequence pertaining to the Plains Indians touches the animal. The relations.h.i.+p of the Indian to the buffalo has nowhere been better stated than in Note 49 to the Benavides _Memorial_, edited by Hodge and Lummis. "The Great Buffalo Hunt at Standing Rock," a chapter in _My Friend the Indian_ by James McLaughlin, sums up the hunting procedure; other outstanding treatments of the buffalo in Indian books are to be found in _Long Lance_ by Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance; _Letters and Notes on... the North American Indians_ by George Catlin; _Forty Years a Fur Trader_ by Charles Larpenteur.

Floyd B. Streeter's chapter on "The Buffalo Range" in _Prairie Trails and Cow Towns_ lists twenty-five sources of information.

The bibliography that supersedes all other bibliographies is in the book that supersedes all other books on the subject--Frank Gilbert Roe's _The North American Buffalo_. More about it in the list that follows.

Nearly all men who got out on the plains were "wrathy to kill"

buffaloes above all else. The Indians killed in great numbers but seldom wastefully. The Spaniards were restrained by Indian hostility. Mountain men, emigrants crossing the plains, Santa Fe traders, railroad builders, Indian fighters, settlers on the edge of the plains, European sportsmen, all slaughtered and slew. Some observed, but the average American hunter's observations on game animals are about as illuminating as the trophy-stuffed den of a rich oilman or the lockers of a packing house.

Lawrence of Arabia won his name through knowledge and understanding of Arabian life and through power to lead and to write. Buffalo Bill won his name through power to exterminate buffaloes. He was a buffalo man in the way that Hitler was a Polish Jew man.

{ill.u.s.t. caption = Harold D. Bugbee: Buffaloes

It is a pleasure to note the writings of sportsmen with inquiring minds and of scientists and artists who hunted. Three examples are: _The English Sportsman in the Western Prairies_, by the Hon. Grantley F.

Berkeley, London, 1861; _Travels in the Interior of North America, 1833-1834_, by Maximilian, Prince of Wied (original edition, 1843), included in that "incomparable storehouse of buffalo lore from early eye-witnesses," _Early Western Travels_, edited by Reuben Gold Thwaites; George Catlin's _Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs and Conditions of the North American Indians_, London, 1841.

Three aspects of the buffalo stand out: the natural history of the great American animal; the interrelations.h.i.+p between Indian and buffalo; the white hunter--and exterminator.

ALLEN, J. A. _The American Bison, Living and Extinct_, Cambridge, Ma.s.s., 1876. Reprinted in 9th Annual Report of the United States Geological and Geographical Survey, Was.h.i.+ngton, 1877. Basic and rich work, much of it appropriated by Hornaday.

BRANCH, E. DOUGLAS. _The Hunting of the Buffalo_, New York, 1925.

Interpretative as well as factual. OP.

COOK, JOHN R. _The Border and the Buffalo_. Topeka, Kansas, 1907.

Personal narrative.

DIXON, OLIVE. _Billy Dixon_, Guthrie, Oklahoma, 1914; reprinted, Dallas, 1927. Bully autobiography; excellent on the buffalo hunter as a type.

OP.

DODGE, R. I. _The Plains of the Great West and Their Inhabitants_, New York, 1877. One of the best chapters of this source book is on the buffalo.

GARRETSON, MARTIN S. _The American Bison_, New York Zoological Society, New York, 1938. Not thorough, but informing. Limited bibliography. OP.

GRINNELL, GEORGE BIRD (1849-1938) may be cla.s.sed next to J. A. Allen and W. T. Hornaday as historian of the buffalo. His primary sources were the buffaloed plains and the Plains Indians, whom he knew intimately. "In Buffalo Days" is a long and excellent essay by him in _American Big-Game Hunting_, edited by Theodore Roosevelt and George Bird Grinnell, New York, 1893. He has another long essay, "The Bison," in _Musk-Ox, Bison, Sheep and Goat_ by Caspar Whitney, George Bird Grinnell, and Owen Wister, New York, 1904. His n.o.ble and beautifully simple _When Buffalo Ran_, New Haven, 1920, is specific on work from a buffalo horse. Again in his n.o.ble two-volume work on _The Cheyenne Indians_ (1923) Grinnell is rich not only on the animal but on the Plains Indian relations.h.i.+p to it. All OP.